M3C Multimedia Centres Network of Slovenia

From Culture.si

The M3C Multimedia Centres Network of Slovenia gathers existing and emerging multimedia initiatives in all Slovene regions and encourages international cooperation. Its members enable free access to and encourage creative use of new technology. They function as venues, events, and workshop (co)producers, and information points.

The M3C Network was established in 2004 when 9 Slovene multimedia centres obtained a 3-year funding contract from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) by applying through the Ministry of Culture to develop an infrastructural environment in relation to information technology and digital culture. Currently there are 20 regional members in the network.

Contents

Background

The M3C Network is rooted in a non-formal network, originally called the Cultural Information Backbone, which was formed in the second half of the 1990s. The project's aim was to connect organisations working with digital and information technologies and artistic production in Slovenia. Following funding from the Ministry of Culture and the former Ministry of Information Society, as well as from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) from 2004 to 2006, the infrastructure of the network was extended to cover all Slovene regions.

Services and web resources

The M3C Network members (co)produce informal educational programmes for local artists and cultural workers to encourage the creative use of technology.

Some of the members have developed regional web portals based on open standards. Today some of the regional portals are defunct. For the archival purposes, here is the list of all of them: Dravoskop cultural portal covering the Štajerska region, Klopotec.net for the Prlekija region and Porton.si for the Primorska region, Mikk.si for the Pomurje region, MC-Brežice.si for the Lower Posavje region, Kunigunda.org covering Savinjska region, and Mostovna.com for the Goriška region, and, not online any more: Nucam.info for the Carinthia region, Troblja.com for the Posavje region (Krško), Gorenjski.kulturnik.si for the Gorenjska region, and Posočje.net for the Upper Posočje region.

A database covering daily cultural events around Slovenia has been fed to Kulturnik.si, an aggregator based on semantic web tools developed by Ljudmila - Ljubljana Digital Media Lab as early as 2005. The Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory has relaunched the Kulturnik.si portal in 2011, and added to the aggregated cultural events also cultural news, and a metasearch engine that gather data from Slovene digital sources and collections related to arts and culture.